In warehousing applications, knowing the whereabouts of a reader such as a hand-held terminal when it scans a product can be very important. The classic solution involves barcoding or tagging key locations in the warehouse, and getting the operator of the hand-held terminal to scan one of these codes after scanning a product. This is a reasonably effective and cheap approach to the determination of the location of the hand-held terminal. However, this approach can be time consuming and is subject to operator error and/or misuse. An alternative approach is to fit each hand-held terminal with a global positioning system (GPS). This is an expensive solution with many drawbacks including the loss of the satellite signal in any warehouse with a metal roof. An additional drawback is that the number of hand-held terminals, for example, radio frequency identification (RFID) readers on the market that are capable of accepting a GPS card is also quite limited.
The use of RFID readers is becoming more popular and as such a need exists for a system for and method of determining the location of an RFID reader such as an RFID hand-held terminal.